Barbell Shrugged

In this episode, Dr. Ben Steel joins Doug Larson and Dr. Mike Lane to break down the psychology of self-sabotage, performance anxiety, and why high performers often get in their own way. Ben shares his background as a former wrestler, certified mental performance consultant, and mental health counselor, explaining how his own experience with pre-performance anxiety led him into sports psychology. The conversation centers on how athletes and driven people often use avoidance, perfectionism, all-or-nothing thinking, and "paralysis by analysis" as protective mechanisms, not because they are lazy or weak, but because they are trying to avoid shame, embarrassment, failure, or exposure.  
The team also explores how self-sabotage shows up differently in athletes, lifters, business owners, and high performers. For some people, it looks like blowing a diet, skipping competition, overtraining, or waiting until everything is perfect before taking action. For others, especially successful people, it can look like over-indexing on work or performance while avoiding uncomfortable emotional conversations, relationships, or deeper personal issues. Ben explains how tools like CBT, visualization, breathing, self-talk, arousal regulation, and pre-performance routines can help, but the deeper solution often starts with empathy, trust, outside perspective, and helping people feel understood rather than judged.
Big takeaway: self-sabotage is usually not a character flaw. It is a protection strategy. The goal is to identify what pain the person is avoiding, reduce the perceived threat, build confidence through small actions, and help them step into a challenge without needing everything to be perfect first.
Doug Larson on Instagram
Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

In this episode, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, and Dr. Mike Lane explain why velocity-based training is a powerful tool for athletes who want to perform better without constantly feeling beat up. Instead of relying on grinders and fatigue-heavy sessions, they show how training with speed and intent can help athletes become more explosive, more efficient, and more prepared for sport. The big picture benefit is simple: you can build strength and power in a way that carries over to sprinting, jumping, changing direction, and competing by focusing on maximizing speed of contraction on every rep.
They also make the case that velocity-based training is not just for elite lifters or sports scientists. Used well, it can help athletes make progress with less unnecessary soreness, joint stress, and wasted volume. The practical value is huge: better power production, better recovery management, and a useful and enjoyable way to match training to the real demands of sport. For athletes, that means a better chance of getting faster, stronger, and more powerful over time.  Enjoy!
Links:
Doug Larson on Instagram
Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Cody Taylor went from living out of a van on a music tour, signed to a major label and playing after Def Leppard, to setting unsupported fastest known times on 550-mile wilderness trails no one had ever completed without a support crew. He didn't start running until 2020. By 2023 he was finishing 100-milers. By 2024 he was carrying a 53-pound pack through 650 kilometers of Quebec backcountry alone, filtering water from mud puddles, taping the skin off his own back, and sleeping on the ground to eventually crossing the finish line. The question isn't how he survived. The question is how he built a body and a mind capable of that.
In this episode, Cody breaks down why strength training is a foundational component of his success in elite endurance performance and what it really takes to go unsupported when every pound in your pack matters and no one is coming to help you. He also covers the mental architecture of doing hard things: why 14 days of solitude in the wilderness will permanently change how you experience a glass of tap water. If you train hard, compete seriously, and want to understand what the human body is actually capable of, this episode is for you. 
Links:
Doug Larson on Instagram
Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

In this episode, Doug Larson and Dr. Mike Lane sit down with Rami Alhamad, founder of Alma and former creator of Push, to explore how AI is changing nutrition coaching and performance tracking. Rami shares his background in engineering, strength training, and startup building, including the journey of creating Push, the velocity-based training platform later acquired by Whoop. The conversation covers how that experience in sensors, data, and coaching systems led him toward a bigger problem: making personalized nutrition guidance dramatically easier and more useful for real people. They also dig into what makes Alma different from traditional food trackers, including logging meals by voice, text, and photos, along with coaching features that help users spot patterns and make better decisions without getting buried in manual data entry.
The second half of the conversation expands into the bigger picture of AI in coaching, health, and business. Doug, Mike, and Rami talk through how tools like wearable integration, supplement tracking, micronutrient guidance, weekly coaching summaries, and coach dashboards can help people stay more consistent while giving coaches better visibility with less friction. They also discuss the future of AI in human performance, why great coaches are more likely to be amplified than replaced, and how the real opportunity is using these tools to automate low-value tasks while preserving the high-trust human relationship that makes coaching effective. For coaches, athletes, and performance-minded listeners, this episode offers a practical look at how AI can improve nutrition and decision-making without losing the personal element that matters most.
Links:
Doug Larson on Instagram
Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

In this episode, Doug Larson, Dr. Mike Lane, and Coach Travis Mash break down the performance pyramid: a simple way to organize the biggest drivers of strength, muscle, and performance. At the base are the non-negotiables: training, nutrition, and sleep. The crew opens by challenging the idea that tiny programming details or trendy methods can outrun poor fundamentals, using the old Colorado Experiment and the modern return of one-set-to-failure arguments as a perfect example. Their main point is clear: almost everyone wants to skip ahead to advanced tactics, but most real progress still comes from training hard, training consistently, eating enough to support the goal, and sleeping enough to recover.
From there, the conversation moves into the second layer of the pyramid: quality and individualization. Once the basics are solid, the next gains come from refining exercise selection, dialing nutrition to the athlete, improving recovery habits, and solving specific weak links. Mash explains that for most lifters and everyday adults, layer one will carry them a very long way, while layer two matters more as you approach elite levels where tiny edges compound over months and years. Mike adds that protein timing, food quality, and recovery details do matter, but only after total calories, total protein, and training consistency are already in place. The message is practical and refreshing: stop putting the cart before the horse, and earn the right to worry about the finer points.
Finally, the team gets into the top layer of the pyramid: marginal gains and nuanced decision-making. This is where advanced supplementation, blood work, biomarker analysis, special recovery tools, and sport-specific exceptions can make sense. They discuss when convenience foods may actually have a place for competition fueling, why supplements like creatine, caffeine, beta-alanine, vitamin D, magnesium, B vitamins, and even bicarbonate can matter in the right context, and how truly elite athletes separate themselves by stacking small advantages over time. The big takeaway is that performance is built like a pyramid for a reason: if the base is weak, everything above it becomes unstable, but when the fundamentals are handled, the small details can become the difference between good and world-class.
Links:
Doug Larson on Instagram
Coach Travis Mash on Instagram